Wednesday, January 30, 2013

I'm not really the kind of person who cares about celebrities. However, when I was in late middle and high school I watched Days of Our Lives every day. I would record it on VHS and come home from school to see what happened that day. My mom even grounded me from it for a month once (but I would record it and watch it after she went to bed). It was pretty much an obsession. And of all the celebrities there were in the world, I really wanted to meet Drake Hogestyn and Deidre Hall (John and Marlena). Like I would daydream about it while I was running. And it's super embarrassing for me to confess this but I have a point.

A little while ago I told Morgan that we were going to go to Disneyland when it gets warm. She was over the moon excited. She talked about the princesses a little at first but she cannot stop talking about Lightning McQueen. Out of the blue she will make a comment like, "I'm going to do a somersault for Lightning McQueen," or, "I'm going to sing We Are Never Getting Back Together to Lightning McQueen," or, "Lightning McQueen is a car. He doesn't have pecs or boobies, huh mom?" Hilariousness! I know she's daydreaming about meeting Lightning McQueen. She wakes up and asks if it's warm yet so we can go.

Speaking of kids (yes, complete change of subject coming). They can get pretty messy and laundry detergent can get pricey. I found this recipe for homemade laundry detergent at Being Creative. It's pretty legit -- like it calls for Oxi Clean, the only thing that gets out that yellow baby poop.

I made some. It's supposed to last at least 6 months and I'm all about that! So far it has worked well for me so I thought I'd be a gem and share with you. Go to Being Creative for the recipe. Oh, and it only costs around $20 for the ingredients.

Tuesday, January 29, 2013

You know the saying "a picture's worth a thousand words?" Well, I just want to ask what these pictures say to you? This is a house we found online while "shopping." The asking price is $599,000. That's like 3/5 of a million dollars and that's a lot for Utah right now. Not my price range but Tom likes to see what's out there. You would think they would all be pristine homes with fabulous pictures. Now look:

Who's sold on how amazing this house is? Come on... a show of hands. Yeah, I'm not impressed either. I mean, these people are asking basically $600,000 for their house and don't bother to take good pictures, let alone CLEAN the house. Seriously. If this is your house, at least put the crap under the bed and actually make the bed for the pictures! If you have a real estate agent who doesn't tell you what I just told you, get a new one (I'll be available soon)!

And if any of you are planning on selling, let this be a lesson to you. Make it look good and it will sell a lot faster for a higher price!

Monday, January 28, 2013

My Friday weigh-in was weird. I weighed myself like 15 times and kept getting 150.4 and 149.0. My scale is funny. I move it all over the floor to see if it is consistent. It was, but on both numbers so I'm going to go with 149.0. Yay, right! In the 140's! I don't think I'll hit my goal of 145 by next Sunday but at least I'm kind of close.

Our weather has been so crappy for weeks. Like so cold and smoggy (inversion). I took my girls to my parents' house for a couple of days last week for something different to do. It was sub 20's when we left our house. About half way there it was in the mid 30's and we were high enough that the air was clean and we could actually see the sky that we had been missing for weeks. Then 30 minutes later, back in the inversion at my parents' house, it was 7 degrees and smoggy.

Driving toward the big wall of lung cancer (inversion).

By Saturday I was just done with this weather. The inversion was supposed to clear out (and it did on Sunday) and the temp was like 37 degrees so couldn't take it anymore. I had to run outside. The air was horrible and my throat burned but I was happy to be outside!

Meanwhile, back at the gym the day before, I took pictures of my progress. I'm still not "there" yet but it's getting better.

before

now

before

now

Starting weight on November 27-- 159.6Total down: 10.6 lbsSize: 10 jeans (although I can button up my 8's, but I would never wear them without Spanx)Goal: 135 lbs, size 6 by MarchHeight: 5' 8"

Thursday, January 24, 2013

Our offer was rejected on the first one. Rejected. Not even countered. We offered low and asked the agent to encourage the owners to counter. I think they were actually offended by our offer. Come on, people! It's not like we're saying your kids are ugly! We just want a house we love for a good price. Is that too much to ask? Gah!

The second house is a short sale and our offer was second in line. I actually don't love this house. I don't like the layout and it stinks like dog poo hoarder nastiness. It's bad. So we pulled our offer. Now we don't have any houses in our finding pool.

Monday, January 21, 2013

Weigh-in was Friday and, yippee, I am down again. 150.4. I'm hoping to be at 145 on Feb. 3 and 135ish by March.

I did some things differently last week. First, I slept. I tried to get 8 hours of sleep every night. I think maybe with naps it all averaged to that. I also didn't eat after 7 for 3 of the nights. Last weekend I ate more calories than I had been. So I'm not sure what helped: the sleep, not eating at night, or eating more so my body didn't think it was starving. Maybe a combination of the three (or maybe the first two). Starting weight on November 27-- 159.6Total down: 9.2 lbsSize: 30 (or 10, I think) jeansGoal: 135 lbs, size 28 (or 6) by MarchHeight (because I know you want to know): 5' 8"

A lot of people are concerned that they will get bored eating healthy foods because there is no variety, especially at night. That was my concern for my family. I didn't want to make separate dinners for us so I did my best to make our dinners interesting, delicious and healthy. Enter Pinterest (and follow me if you'd like). I found these delicious recipes, changed them a little to make them more healthy (or low cal) and fed them to my fam.

First of all, you can follow the recipes on each site but just so you know, I did not add any oil or butter, even if it called for it.

Mashed Cauliflower from What's For Dinner?: I used the cauliflower part instead of the potatoes.

Thursday, January 17, 2013

I printed this "I Love Us" picture a while ago and put it in my bedroom but it looked kind of out of place since the bedroom was serene -- gray and white. This is more fun so I decided to move it to the entrance of our house, at least for the season.

I found the printable at eighteen25. They didn't have this color so I just played with it in Picasa and turned it to this lovely shade of pink. Then I had it printed at Walmart.

There should be pink flowers in the pink vase but my little pink-loving girl stole them and I just found them yesterday in the closet under the stairs amid her toys.

So, if you like it and want to download one for yourself, just go to eighteen25. I can't take credit for it except for the fact that you can change the color.

Tuesday, January 15, 2013

I have been thinking about how to teach Morgan about different aspects of money for weeks. Things came to me little by little but I think I finally figured out something that will work for us.

I want her to learn how to work so I picked chores that a 3-4 year old can do. I also want her to make money by commission and not by allowance (entitlement). And we are teaching her about quarters, dimes and nickels.

Since it is so cold and we can't go outside I took her to IKEA to get some exercise in the play place while I sat on a couch and looked at Facebook on my phone fed the baby. I had a few minutes to kill so I perused the downstairs stuff where there is always something I want. This time I found some pink magnets -- perfect for my pink-loving girl.

When I got home I found pictures of each of the chores that she will be in charge of and printed them out. I decoupaged them to the magnets but the magnets are so shiny smooth that they didn't stay so I fixed it with some double stick tape.

Some of the chores are bigger to do once a week and others are daily. Tom helped me put a value to each chore. For her to be able to know, I taped pictures of the money amount (ie 2 quarters and 2 dimes) next to the picture of the chore. I also taped the days, mostly for my sake. Here is her list:

pick up toys - Daily (but I accidently only put M-F) 10 cents

sort laundry - M. 70 cents.

dust - T. 50 cents.

clean sink - Daily. 5 cents.

clean mirrors - T. 50 cents.

make bed - Daily. 5 cents.

load/unload dishwasher - M Th S. 30 cents.

clean toilet (this is Morgan's favorite thing to do) - T. $1

When she is done with the chore she gets to move the magnet to the smiley face side. I picked up a cookie sheet at the dollar store to use as the metal part.

She gets paid after each chore and she puts the money in a "commission" jar (label to be made). At the end of the week (or when she is ready to spend some) she puts 10% in the tithing jar, 40% in the saving jar, and 50% in the spending jar. She sometimes asks if she can go to McDonald's or Five Guys and I'm not big on taking her there more than once a week so now instead of plain old "no" I can say that if she doesn't have enough money, we can't go. Plus she gets to learn the value of money. It's pretty brilliant if you ask me! :)

Here she is hard at work cleaning the mirror. Oh, and FYI, I don't let her do anything dangerous and I supervise all chores.

Monday, January 14, 2013

How was your weekend? Mine was full of self pity eating since I didn't get any closer to my weight loss goal. But I'm ready to go at it again and refocus this week. Since I have been at it for 6 weeks I am ready to increase cardio and do more reps of lighter weights. This will hopefully stimulate fat loss... hopefully. It normally does, but I'm not really normal right now. There are often times when I (and many other people) can't make it to the gym but still need to do some resistance training to build my massive muscles. This week is going to be one of them because of Tom's work schedule and me being with the kids. Thankfully I have a treadmill for cardio. I'm still not over how great it is! If you don't have one, a friend of mine told me about a great app called Nike Training Club. I've done some of the workouts and they are really awesome. You can also find workout videos on Youtube. Once I found a Jillian workout and did that. So anyway, not being able to go to the gym is no excuse. You can get a good workout in your living room. Since I can't go to the gym, I'm going to do these workouts (below). If you can go to the gym and want to use one of the workouts I do, you can find them on my baby-weight loss list. Good luck this week!

How do it: Perform this workout as a circuit, completing the prescribed number of repetitions of each exercise without resting. Once you've done one set of each exercise, rest for two minutes, then repeat the entire circuit two more times.Day 1:Bodyweight Squat -- 15-20Incline Push-up -- 12-15Hip Raises -- 10Side Plank -- 30 seconds each sideFloor Y-T-I Raises -- 8-12 reps of each

Friday, January 11, 2013

You guys, I weighed in and I haven't lost anything. Not. An. Ounce. Actually, if you want to get technical, I gained almost a pound this week. I am so frustrated because I'm doing everything right -- unless by chance I'm not eating enough calories and my body is hanging on. I've even been doing 2-a-days going to the gym in the morning and treadmill later in the day. Apparently I don't lose extra weight by breastfeeding. I'm just not that lucky and I kind of hate those who are. It stinks because I normally can lose easily when I do it right. Frustrating! The good thing is that I have heard from a couple of you and you are losing so good job! Keep it up.

I'm really excited for the guest post I have today. I have been reading Megan's blog for a while and it's pretty much one of my faves. She's funny and tells it like it is. Her daughter is the same age as Morgan and she does a lot of DIY. The other day I was reading her blog and Tom glanced at a picture of her and asked when I took that (he thought it was me) because she even kind of looks like me. She also happens to have an incredible weight loss story and I asked her to share it with you. So be sure to head over to Miss Madison's Charmed Life and leave her some comment love:

Tuesday, January 8, 2013

When I learned how to lose weight (fat) the right way I had been out of school (college) for a couple of years. It's funny because I majored in exercise science, a pre-med major at BYU, and really didn't learn anything about weight loss. I went to the gym but mostly did only cardio. I ate fat free food because that's what I learned in the 90's. It wasn't until I got a job as an exercise and nutrition consultant that I figured it out. I had been married for about 6 months and was at the highest weight I had ever been. When I started working as a consultant I also started a nutrition and exercise plan that my boss made for me. I went from 150 lbs and 30% body fat to 131 lbs and 20% body fat in 12 weeks. But let me tell you. I was strict. I did everything that my boss told me to do and I got amazing results.

Because I spent 12 weeks eating perfectly proportioned and balanced meals, I learned what to eat and how much of it I can eat. I'll be honest, I measured everything during that time and I often measure my food now. I usually don't add up my calories for the entire day because I eat 5-7 meals and I just can't be bothered with that. Instead I count the calories for each meal. I know that if I stay between 200-400 calories I will hit my caloric goal. For example, if I want to eat 1400 calories I can eat seven 200 calorie meals/snacks or one 400 calorie, two 300 calorie and two 200 calorie meals. That way I only have to know the calorie count of what I'm eating at the time. It works for me.

Here is a list of the food that I eat. I make sure to have protein at every meal. I usually have something from the carb list, and I try to have at least 3 from the green veggie list every day. At breakfast I have a protein and two carbs (1 egg, 1 extra egg white, 1/2 cup oatmeal, 1 apple). If I have a late night snack it is usually just a low fat protein (like an egg white omelet with stuff from the green veggie list).

Monday, January 7, 2013

I was perusing Bodybuilding.com... just kidding. I was on Pinterest and I came across this story of how this girl went from unhealthy to super hot fitness model/body show competitor. She gave an example of her workout so that is what I'm going to do this week... since I'm toying with the idea of doing a body show this summer. Anyone want to do it with me?

Click on one of the pictures to read her story.

Oh, and since I didn't blog on Friday, my Friday weigh in was 152.8. I mostly just stayed the same through Christmas and New Years. PS I'm switching day 3 and day 7. I rest on Sundays. You can do what you want. Same results.

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About Me

I am Kelli. Wife. Mother. Real Estate Agent. Home Stager. Furniture Refinisher. Runner. Aspiring Writer. You name it, I probably want to be it. I love, love, love real estate and one day I want to be a full time investor (debt free) focusing on remodeling and decorating houses. Having owned 6 properties in 6 years, I think I know what not to do (and a little of what to do).